Kingston SSD speed after 18months

Soldato
Joined
19 Jun 2009
Posts
3,986
About 18 months ago I purchased a Kingston 64GB value drive. When I purchased the drive it was very fast (reading), however from day one it always had a delayed write issue, that at it worst would lock totally my computer. This drive uses the JMicron controller and has no trim support.

To solve the write issue I moved anything that's normally written to HDD locations, temp files, outlook files, page, everything I could possible find was moved to HDD. However over time with numerous software updates it's inevitable there will be writes made.

For example, if Avast does an update at boot up, it locks the machine out for maybe another 2 mins. Many windows updates I have to leave the computer at night.

I have just over 1gb of space free on the drive. The following benchmark in CrystalDiskMark.

Seq Read 45.16 Write 0.679
512 Read 45.89 Write 0.952
4k Read 7.904 Write 0.091
4k QD32 8.116 Write 0.059

The only reason I keep the drive is the computer is working machine, and it's currently to much trouble to re-install windows. I would be happy booting even on a slow media drive compared to what I have now. I know the newer SSD's solve the issue's experienced with an early drive like this Kingston, however it will be a while before I look at SSD's again.
 
Last edited:
About 18 months ago I purchased a Kingston 64GB value drive. When I purchased the drive it was very fast (reading), however from day one it always had a delayed write issue, that at it worst would lock totally my computer. This drive uses the JMicron controller and has no trim support.

To solve the write issue I moved anything that's normally written to HDD locations, temp files, outlook files, page, everything I could possible find was moved to HDD. However over time with numerous software updates it's inevitable there will be writes made.

For example, if Avast does an update at boot up, it locks the machine out for maybe another 2 mins. Many windows updates I have to leave the computer at night.

I have just over 1gb of space free on the drive. The following benchmark in CrystalDiskMark.

Seq Read 45.16 Write 0.679
512 Read 45.89 Write 0.952
4k Read 7.904 Write 0.091
4k QD32 8.116 Write 0.059

The only reason I keep the drive is the computer is working machine, and it's currently to much trouble to re-install windows. I would be happy booting even on a slow media drive compared to what I have now. I know the newer SSD's solve the issue's experienced with an early drive like this Kingston, however it will be a while before I look at SSD's again.

SSD tech is almost not recognisable from where they were just 18 months ago. 18 months is a lifetime in this tech. Anyways, a revisit to one of the newer much faster SSD's should be in order for you if you got the 100 odd quid to spend on one of the sandforce based 60gb ones (vertex 2e etc)
 
SSD tech is almost not recognisable from where they were just 18 months ago. 18 months is a lifetime in this tech. Anyways, a revisit to one of the newer much faster SSD's should be in order for you if you got the 100 odd quid to spend on one of the sandforce based 60gb ones (vertex 2e etc)

I understand SSD has moved on, however it's still no excuse for the degraded performance of this drive. If I had known what would have happened would never of purchased it.

I'm going to skip SSD for a while, maybe go hybrid if anything.
 
Have you tried freeing up more space than just 1GB? Fairly certain you aren't supposed to fill SSDs as then they can't swap out any bad cells (something like that :))

Maybe try and move/delete stuff until you have about 10GB free, then see what the performance is like.
 
Have you tried freeing up more space than just 1GB? Fairly certain you aren't supposed to fill SSDs as then they can't swap out any bad cells (something like that :))

Maybe try and move/delete stuff until you have about 10GB free, then see what the performance is like.

Ok feeling a bit of a muppet now.. I deleted some stuff, and now have a total of 5.5gb free. Repeated test again

Seq Read 98.95 Write 58.81
512k Read 88.86 Write 47.85
4k Read 12.15 Write 1.793
4kqd32 Read 13.20 Write 1.821

The computer still locks up when writing large files, but still not half as bad as what it was..

But anyway theres a 10-20x increase in write speed. The last 1gb must have been totally fragmented. I will say I found some CompanyOfHero game patches to delete that were installed early on in drives life, so most of the space that's released should be non-fragmented.
 
Last edited:
As you've had it 18 months, what OS did you install originally (if not replaced it since with Windows 7)? As drive alignment might be an issue too.

If drives lacks trim have you tried logging out of Windows and leaving computer for a few hours. Hopefully the Kingston unit has idle garbage collection built-in to the controller, to clean up cells.

Edit: Your reply above beat my message.
 
I'm using XP64, it's been installed all this time.

I'm almost certain the drive has no trim. It's a JMicron controller drive, with just 1k of cache, always under impression it's a very basic drive.

Later Kingston drives definitely had trim support. Mine is a V version, however later ones were V+ versions.

EDIT:

Just checked on Kingston website and they don't appear to list this drive. The following is the drive I have.

http://www.trustedreviews.com/storage/review/2009/09/03/Kingston-SSDNow-V-Series-64GB/p1
 
Last edited:
buy cheap buy twice IMO .

for similar money the Crucial m225 64GB would be a lot better as it has TRIM ( if your chipset allows it) and Garbage Collection. Im sure OCZ ,patriot etc have similar spec/price drives of you could sell yours and re-invest . SSDs are such a major improvement to PCs and should not be written off on this poor experience
 
I'm using XP64, it's been installed all this time.

I'm almost certain the drive has no trim. It's a JMicron controller drive, with just 1k of cache, always under impression it's a very basic drive.

Later Kingston drives definitely had trim support. Mine is a V version, however later ones were V+ versions.

EDIT:

Just checked on Kingston website and they don't appear to list this drive. The following is the drive I have.

http://www.trustedreviews.com/storage/review/2009/09/03/Kingston-SSDNow-V-Series-64GB/p1

Unless XP 64 is different to XP, then the drive won't be aligned. So that will have some effect on speed too.

Not sure the best way to go about correcting it though.
 
The OCZ had some good tweaks to make on XP (I think Vista also) for early SSD's. Google SSD tweaks and it'll get some links. :)
Have them written down at work as I use them on some D430s we have. Disabling pre-fetcher, indexing and the usual rubbish is the gist of it.

The Sandisk SSD in the D430 is hideously old. Shows no power improvements over mechanical drives, is slower than competing mechanical drives & has massive speed issues. (I believe the first models are limited to ATA-33 for power reasons... :| )

The tweaks on the forums got rid of the large pauses we were experiencing.

I certainly wouldn't be put off SSD tech, having used the older drives. They are worlds apart in performance and useability(sp). :)
 
Last edited:
Stoney, yes I agree it was a sub £100 drive 18 months ago. Other drives were almost double, also I was not aware of the trim issue. When I first installed drive it was rapid for application load times, other from lack of trim it was a good value drive.

Bane, what's the aligned issue?
 
Apart from alignment issue, it doesn't matter if the SSD supports TRIM or not. As Windows XP doesn't include TRIM support, so it wouldn't be used even if SSD had feature.

The SSD have 4k cells. When you create a partition, the offset used by Vista and Windows 7 causes partition to begin level with a cell. Windows XP doesn't include the same off-set, so partiton starts partially over a cell. Hence not aligned.

Sure someone else can explain it better or find some pictures for it. You can have a look at Paragon Partition Tool presentation.
 
Cheers for explaining alignment issue, I did have a quick search and it's basically what your saying.

Yes I was aware XP is not supported by trim. Some time soon i'll get Win 7, just i've run xp 64 for a long time and it's still doing everything I want. When I eventually go Win 7 i'll choose another SSD.


The OCZ had some good tweaks to make on XP (I think Vista also) for early SSD's. Google SSD tweaks and it'll get some links. :)
Have them written down at work as I use them on some D430s we have. Disabling pre-fetcher, indexing and the usual rubbish is the gist of it.

The Sandisk SSD in the D430 is hideously old. Shows no power improvements over mechanical drives, is slower than competing mechanical drives & has massive speed issues. (I believe the first models are limited to ATA-33 for power reasons... :| )

The tweaks on the forums got rid of the large pauses we were experiencing.

I certainly wouldn't be put off SSD tech, having used the older drives. They are worlds apart in performance and useability(sp). :)

I had forgotton, but I had already done this 18 months ago. I turned prefetch off, plus a couple of other minor things (forget what).

I found a post about using MS Disk Cache to solve jitter issues. MS Disk Cache is a 2003 command line exe that caches disk writes. Anyhow I have installed (batch file in windows start up) and it appears to have stopped Jitter, windows feels smoother. I tested a 4GB file copy, and watched the main memory eat up so it works. Hopefully no disk corruptions due to it, but so far so good.
 
Last edited:
We used that also, seemed to solve some more pause issues we were having, and haven't had any corruption in the year that it's been used. *touch wood*

Doesn't sound like there's much else you can do though.
Keep space free and try not to have anything writing to the disk if it's not needed... :p
 
I'll tell you what did cause data corruption on the SSD. When I had writing caching enabled inside hardware properties. From what I can gather setting this tells the OS that the drive can cache writes internally. When this was enabled the SSD would loose clusters etc.

I have this disabled, however the dskcache is running in power cache mode (software cache). So far no issues, and pc appears more snappy.
 
Back
Top Bottom